A Private Branch Exchange (PBX) is a telephone exchange that makes connections among the internal telephones of an organization, such as a private business or telephone network. The PBX allows these internal telephones to connect to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) via trunk lines and/or the Internet. A hosted PBX system delivers PBX functionality as a service, available over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and/or the Internet. A telephone company typically provides hosted PBXs using equipment located in the premises of the telephone company's exchange. This means the customer organization does not need to buy or install PBX equipment and the telephone company can use the same switching equipment to service multiple PBX hosting accounts. Furthermore, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateways can be combined with traditional PBX functionality enabling businesses and organizations to use their managed Internet/Intranet to help reduce long distance expenses, enjoy the benefits of a single network for voice and data which gives greater cost savings, mobility and increased redundancy.
For users that rely on a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Private Branch Exchanges (PBX) for their organization's communications system, reliability of the system to complete phone calls is a primary concern, and particularly of concern is what will happen if the system becomes overloaded or the system goes down. This concern may be further exacerbated if the organization relies on a Hosted VoIP PBX where the service is accessed over the Internet and shared with many other organizations, and therefore the service may be subject to greater possibility of overload or Interruption due to Internet service outages.
The requirements of a hosted VoIP private branch exchange (PBX) have created the need for a new kind of outage bypass solution. Pre-existing systems fail to protect users against failure and overload of the VoIP PBX and/or the Internet service used to connect the VoIP PBX to the users' calling device. Without such a system, if the VoIP PBX has a failure or if there are network or other problems with the connection to a user's Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) devices (telephone terminal), then users are no longer able to make or receives calls, and callers receive no notification about what sort of problem exists. Pre-existing systems may have provided some level of unidirectional bypass or override, but heretofore no system has existed that provides bidirectional bypass with outage protection for both VoIP PBX overload or failure and also internet service failure or interruption combined with a configurable problem notification capability.
The present invention meets one or more of the above-referenced needs as described herein in greater detail.